Happy 80th Birthday, Dalai Lama!

17 Wise Quotes To Change The Way You Think

by Allie White, MBG Editorial Team, July 6 2015

A very happy 80th birthday to the Dalai Lama! The spiritual leader of his people and religion for 65 years (he assumed the role when he was 15), he's an author, philosopher, Nobel Peace prize winner and prolific speaker.

To honor his wisdom and years of knowledge, we've compiled 17 of his quotes that speak to love, compassion, peace, humanity, humility, violence and the environment. We hope they make your day a little brighter and bring new perspective to your life.

"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."

"It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come."

"The root of happiness is altruism — the wish to be of service to others."

The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it’s open.

"I feel that the essence of spiritual practice is your attitude toward others. When you have a pure, sincere motivation, then you have right attitude toward others based on kindness, compassion, love and respect. Practice brings the clear realisation of the oneness of all human beings and the importance of others benefiting by your actions."

"Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself. It is wrong to expect some final satisfaction to come from money or from a computer."

"If there is love, there is hope that one may have real families, real brotherhood, real equanimity, real peace. If the love within your mind is lost and you see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education or material comfort you have, only suffering and confusion will ensue"

"I call myself a feminist. Isn't that what you call someone who fights for women's rights?"

"Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength."

"Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive."

"I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion and elimination of ignorance, selfishness and greed."

"Everyday, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.”

"When I meet people in different parts of the world, I am always reminded that we are all basically alike: we are all human beings. Maybe we have different clothes, our skin is of a different colour, or we speak different languages. That is on the surface. But basically, we are the same human beings. That is what binds us to each other. That is what makes it possible for us to understand each other and to develop friendship and closeness."

"Because we all share this small planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. That is not just a dream, but a necessity."

"Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions."
"Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck."

"If you don’t love yourself, you cannot love others. You will not be able to love others. If you have no compassion for yourself then you are not capable of developing compassion for others."

Photo Credit: Pinterest

Plant Pockets

Craft Collective  www.craftcollective.co.nz

When:

Tue 7 Jul 2015, 6:00pm–8:00pm
Thu 9 Jul 2015, 10:00am–12:00pm
Sun 12 Jul 2015, 10:00am–12:00pm

Where: Craft Collective, 85 Twelfth Avenue, Tauranga

Restrictions: R13
General Admission: $40.00

Oxygen making, toxin removing, all round good guys - Vertical Gardens are trending right now both indoors and out. We can teach you how to create Plant Pockets, which you can then connect to build this stunning feature.
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Grab a friend and make it a creative catch up!

June 15, 2015

How To Let Your Spirit (Not Your Ego) Be Your Guide

by Margaret Paul

Did you know you can connect with your spiritual guidance at will — any time you want?
In order to do this, you need to understand the concept of "frequency" — the level at which your energy vibrates. Our bodies vibrate at a low frequency so that we can actually see one another. If we vibrated at the rate of a hummingbird's wings for instance, we would not be able to see each other through the naked eye.
And while our bodies vibrate at a low frequency, we actually have the ability to raise the frequency of our energy. This is what is necessary to connect with our spiritual guidance. The spirit vibrates at a very high frequency, which is why most of us are unable to see spiritual beings.

Imagine how it feels to be in a room full of closed off, angry, judgmental people. This is a low frequency. Now, imagine the feeling in a room full of open, loving, and joyful people. This is a higher frequency.

So how can we begin to connect with Spirit?

The Key To Raising Your Frequency

Your intent is the driving force behind raising your energetic frequency. Your frequency is low when your intention is to control others, control outcomes and control your own feelings. When your intent is to control, you might resort to behaviors that lower your frequency, such as anger, judgment, withdrawal, compliance and resistance.

When your intent is to learn to love yourself and share your love with others, your frequency is high. Your spiritual guidance is here to lead you toward what is in your highest good, so when your intent is to learn to love yourself and others and support the highest good of all, you raise your frequency high enough to connect with your guidance.

Our intent is the most powerful choice we have in life. Given that we have free will, we get to choose our intent, moment-by-moment. But when our intent is to control, we close off our heart and are cut us from Spirit. Our intent to learn and love opens our heart and thus, opens us to Spirit.

And once you've connected to Spirit, then other choices can help raise your frequency even higher. Practices like meditation and prayer, being in nature, playing with animals, listening to beautiful music, movement and dance, creative endeavors and so on, can all help to raise your vibration.

What Gets In The Way?

The "wounded ego" part of our mind fears losing control and therefore, this part of us also fears opening to Spirit. To connect with Spirit, we have to be in a place where it is more important to us to evolve in our ability to love, rather than avoid pain with various forms of control.

Food can also get in the way, as it also has frequency. Clean, organic fruits and vegetables have the highest frequency. Keeping my frequency high has been a huge motivation for me to eat really well!

Processed and packaged products, sugar, and GMO foods have a very low frequency. These low frequency food-like products are very hard on the body, and make it hard to raise your energy high enough to connect with Spirit. I call these products "ego foods," since they lower our frequency and revert us back to our ego-wounded state of self.

Lack of sleep and a sedentary lifestyle can also make it hard to raise your frequency. So does stress.

Connecting with Spirit is simple, but not always easy. If you want at-will spiritual connection, then you need to stay open to learning about loving yourself and others, learn to lovingly manage your stress, get enough sleep and exercise, and eat clean non-processed organic foods.

It's when we connect with Spirit that we are more freely capable of manifesting our dreams. Can you think of anything more important than being guided by your loving Source? All aspects of your life will improve — physically, emotionally, financially, relationally — when you allow Spirit to guide you, rather than your ego.

Notes taken from - Meditation for the Modern Life

Learn to Meditate course Saturday 4 October 2014

Teacher, Kelsang Richog, Buddhist Nun

www.meditateintauranga.org

• First obstacle to meditation is our distractions. These obstacles are our enemies
• A mind that sees others as special – very beneficial
• Freedom from pain, freedom from problems
• Approach needs to change to achieve happiness. The obstruction is your mental attitude
• Cherish yourself. Change views and intentions
• Open ourselves up so we have the capacity to cherish others
• The more we are able to do this, the happier we are going to be
• When we recognize others kindness, we cherish them
• Think about benefits of considering others
• Contemplate the kindness of our Mother
• If we take away everything people have given us (directly or indirectly), we are left with nothing, not even our body
• To develop patience, we need an irritating person
• To develop love, we need some to love
• We need an object for our mind to develop these positive qualities
• To develop compassion, we need to develop love and we need to observe suffering
• We can use suffering to develop powerful minds to motivate us to do things and make changes 

Meditation:

Object: determination/intention

Focus: kindness of others, appreciate others

“The less we focus on ourselves, the less pain we have.”

Everyone has his or her own sufferings.

Namaste

Via Syma Kharal on May 5, 2015 spiritual materialism
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates:

At the first gate, ask yourself “Is is true?”

At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?”

At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?”

~ Rumi

I recently found myself removed from a Facebook group I had joined that describes itself as “a loving community of spiritual lightworkers intended for sharing spiritual growth, support, information, resources and other helpful tips and tools.”

I believed I participated accordingly by “Liking” others’ posts and sharing helpful resources to support fellow members, such as articles I published with elephant journal and free worldwide distant healing events I offer monthly. I thus figured the removal was an error and requested to join again, but the request was surprisingly denied.

Unsure of what led to this, I contacted the administrators asking if they could share what happened. A few days later I received a reply from one of the two explaining that while she herself didn’t remove me, only admins are allowed to post events. This confused and disappointed me on several levels. First, as there were no community guidelines beyond the group description, I wondered how loving it was to abruptly remove an unsuspecting member who unintentionally broke an unwritten rule. Second, as a community aiming to foster support and the sharing of resources, I wondered how reserving the exclusive the right to post free healing events served the over 10,000 members. And finally, I wondered how kind it was to essentially ban the sensitive healer types the group is meant to serve.

While this isn’t a particularly drastic example, it did get me thinking of other experiences of snubbing in the “spiritual community.”

There was the raw-vegan yoga student who asked me if I was vegetarian and stopped attending my classes—which he had claimed were really helping his back issues—after I replied I wasn’t.

There was the popular yoga studio owner who stated that if I was interested in practicing “real yoga” (instead of attending classes at a local gym with some of the most grounded, loving and inspiring teachers I have had), that I should join his studio instead.

There was the cosmetician at my first and only visit to a Sephora shop whom I had simply asked about a tinted moisturizer for my yoga teacher training in Thailand. Instead of suggesting a product, she took it upon herself to lecture me what yoga is and isn’t about: It’s not about having clear skin, you shouldn’t care how you look, you shouldn’t try to impress others, you need to let go of your ego and just let your skin detox and breathe for once. It wasn’t even so much what she said, but the highly condescending tone she used that took me aback.

My clients, students and friends have expressed similar observations and disappointments in the spiritual community. A friend who started taking yoga classes sadly expressed that after months of trying to befriend fellow students she felt a camaraderie with given their mutual love of yoga, that her efforts were never reciprocated because she perhaps just wasn’t “hippie” enough for them to fit in.

Interestingly, my own inner spiritual snob came out when I met such “hippies” during yoga teacher training. The training was set on a secluded Thai beach with several yoga, meditation and detox retreat centers, as well as the only bars on the island that sold drugs and held night-long raves. At the time, immersed in reading sacred teachings, in awe of the natural beauty all around me and high on the love within my group, I couldn’t understand how or why these “bohemians” could meditate, do beach yoga and sing kirtans (call-and-response devotional chanting), while simultaneously smoking marijuana, doing hard drugs, raving all night, drinking and screaming in the ocean at sunrise and comparing who had sex with more strangers at the party.

Thankfully, I was able to realize what my real problem was: I somehow thought it was my place to look down on them for their “unspiritual” behavior, which in the very moment I did, disconnected me from my own spirit.

While getting on the “spiritual path” can be completely transformational and open us to profound healing, wisdom and miracles, the tools and teachings we practice—no matter what tradition or trend they follow—usually share the same ultimate aim: inner peace and the perfection of love. But when we get so caught up in what we are practicing rather than why, we can slip into the temptation to judge rather than discern, condemn rather than love and exclude rather than accept.

Even with the best of intentions, it’s all too easy to identify with being a “lightworker” and succumb to darkness.

We may guise a condescending remark by ending it with “Namaste” or “love and light.”

We may gossip about someone and say we are simply “honoring our truth.”

We may say things like, “I am not religious, I am spiritual” in an attempt to disassociate ourselves from what we might perceive as the dogmatic and judgmental nature of organized religion, and yet turn around and exhibit the same exclusivity and rigidity that we think have risen above of.

We may share our love for animals while inwardly calling a meat-eater a murderer.

We may gracefully flow into the most physically advanced yoga pose and yet find those bending their knees in forward fold just not good at or committed enough to yoga.

We may think of ourselves as old souls with many incarnations and then deem someone we think isn’t as evolved as us a “new soul” who clearly has not lived many lives.

We may begin our mornings with a loving-kindness meditation and then resent our “totally unconscious” corporate employer the rest of the day.

These are just some examples of how we may be more attached to the idea of being spiritual rather than practicing the universal spiritual values of love, acceptance, compassion, peace and oneness. The thing to remind ourselves of in these dark moments is that everyone is spiritual because everyone has a spirit. We are all seekers whether we know it or not. We are all lightworkers because the spark of the Divine shines within each of us.

To keep myself in check and monitor any spiritual pretentiousness that creeps up in me, I have developed a three-step process that helps me stay centered in my spirit rather than caught up in my spirituality:

1. Observe Consciously

One of the greatest gifts of spiritual teachings and practices is to help us become aware of our natural human reactions and emotions. We may not be able to control our inner reactions, but if we can catch ourselves as soon as thoughts like, “They are so (fill in the blank)!” come up, we become a witness to our reactions rather than bound by them or identified with them.

2. Accept Compassionately

Once we realize we have slipped into judgement and made ourselves better than or superior to another, instead of condemning ourselves for condemning, we can practice compassion for our own humanness. We can take a deep breath, process our feelings and welcome what we might learn about ourselves.

3. Respond Lovingly

Now that are aware of whatever has come up for us, we can go beyond accepting our human reactions and transcending them by asking one simple question: “What would love do?” The moment we ask this, we bypass our ideas and ideologies and get right to the heart and soul—where all spiritual paths are trying to lead us anyways and yet getting there does not require any specific path at all.

Sometimes the heart will tell us to accept, connect, invite, open and include, and sometimes it may tell us to walk away, speak up, draw a boundary, discern and be firm. But no matter what the heart says, it will always do it from, for and with love.

Whatever spiritual path we follow, how we treat others along the way says nothing about them but only defines us. So the next time we are about to say “Namaste” to someone, let us be mindful of whether we are truly intending to honor and connect with their inner light, or simply trying to outshine them with ours. We can then take a step back, reconnect with our hearts and speak and act from our spirit rather than our spirituality.

Because the world doesn’t need our lightworker lifestyles. It needs, more than anything, our kindness and love.

~

Author: Syma Kharal

Editor: Caroline Beaton

When the body is only relaxed, you are lost in the relaxation. This is a passive or lazy state. But the light body is awareness. In this awareness there is a transference from the object, the body, to the subject, awareness. Then the body, freed from its objectivity, appears in awareness as light, pure energy.

In observation free from reaction, you will act intelligently. Where you feel a lack you will make an addition of certain elements, and where you feel a heaviness you will omit certain things, until you come to the organic body, where the expanded, light, energy body is freed. No system can bring you to know yourself in this way. Only reaction-free observation, seeing the facts as they are.

All this is on the level of observation. Simply observe in openness, and you will come to the right way.

Extracts from Open to the Unknown - Dialogues in Delphi by Jean Klein